


Road Song

by DeanRH



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:28:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27002749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeanRH/pseuds/DeanRH
Summary: A poem in the style of Howl, from Dean to Castiel.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 8
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

And we fell into the bed, that blessed ocean, in a tangle of limbs and the memory, yes, the memory of the monsters we've hunted and the people we've saved and the earth-not-magic magic of your beautiful blue eyes and the song you sing at the height of it, my love, brought there by my hand to be holy, angel though you are, it was always like you had never known heaven until that moment, trust and worship there as you shattered around my name and I found salvation in that endless blue -

like the sea, yes, my love, like the ocean that lives in you, like the monster that you are beneath those miles of gorgeous golden skin, I could map but I am no cartographer, no man who can draw the perfect lines of you and declare myself finished, I will always be exploring you just as I will always be exploring the road, highways that I know so well and backroads we have yet to give our blessing, America is forever mapped beneath my hands, written out in the miles on my skin that I transfer to you with the touch of fingertips, of aching, of wanting -

and we are beautiful together, you and I; did you know, my angel? the songs sung of us are endless, like the ocean of your eyes, like the road we ride, the blessed and the mundane, as my lips offer benediction and your voice calls for me, drenched in the rain as we chase each other into the door of another nameless motel and fall together among the sheets while the thunderstorm rages outside and indoors, the great unknowable creature that you are and the penitent that I am on my knees before you, the glory of the heavens and the taste of Iowa backroads at midnight dappled with the stars and fried chicken from the convenience store down the road-

and no one, no one, my love, has marked our existence, we live beyond worlds and beyond time and in the rut and groove of each other, in the Arizona desert sand and the delicate arches of Utah, in the seashell motels of Florida and its long, long bridge over the ocean, the ocean in your eyes, and you tell me that my eyes are like the great prairielands grasses and being with me is like autumn in New England where the leaves fall in colors that look like the riches of the world beyond, all reds and greens and golds, that I am America in the guise of a man -

and I, I tell you that you are not America, but the ocean that surrounds it, blue, blue, all different kinds of blue and gray and deep, filled with creatures no one understands and dangerous, deadly, sailor-haunted and sublime, and what right do I have asking an ocean to make love to me, but you say -

the ocean holds America in its arms, all the bad and good of it, the memory and the horrors of it, but also the hope -

and it is here, in that hope, we carve out ourselves and each other, into new men.


	2. Chapter 2

And yes, I'm with you in Rockland -

I'm with you in Canton, and Ames, and in Atlantic City washed in a bygone age, and in Los Angeles where the homeless still lie in the gutter and dream of the stars, oscar-wild -

I'm with you in Cayo Hueso, where naked hedonism reigns, and the bare-breasted women flash riots of color, hammocks hung from gold rings in the nipples of their pendulous breasts, like the breasts of truck-stop waitresses and five-and-dime girls, the cavalcade of flesh that led me to you, and the glories of your skin were finally enough for me, as if I had forever been searching the thighs and cunts of roadside women for something I would find in your arms alone -

and oh, oh, your arms, the delicate strength and beauty there, the songs I could sing of them, if only I knew how to sing.

and I'm with you in Northfield, where the people hunted down outlaws all together -

and I'm with you in the dip and curve of the Grand Canyon, so vast and breathless, and still see the natural wonder only in the rise of your cheekbone -

and I'm with you in New York City, that teeming beast, of death and murder, of joy and fascination, of acceptance of the extreme weird, of the beacon once promised now dimmed by the sight of the torch in the lady's hand, for the tired and weary, for the immigrants that came here -

that brought me here, in the end, that brought you here, in the end -

and I'm with you in Texas, the long winding roads where the sun can burn skin through the window and the land feels like forever, like church, like time -

and I'm with you in New Mexico, where the scorpions move together at sunset and the desert turns that purple color with the evening light -

names, places, people, billboards, the eternal American road -

but it is you, my love, 

you, angel-mine,

that makes it all worth doing, that makes this life worth having,

you are the journey and the destination.


	3. Chapter 3

you tell me, _I'm the size of your Chrysler Building,_

but I see you in the giant sequoias,

the redwoods towering over the California road,

guardians, protectors,

forces of nature,

still and everlasting and eternal.

you tell me, _just so you know...why I can't help -_

with blue eyes turned to the moon,

but I see you, tactician, strategist, Castiel,

in our innovation,

the moon landings, in Tesla's inventions -

so many things immigrant and native and American all at once,

separate, together, intelligence beyond stars.

you tell me, _I love you...I love all of you,_

and I heard _because you're family,_

but not what you meant,

those words for me alone,

_I love you, all of you,_

_everything you are, Dean Winchester._

you would speak them later, into the hollow of my collarbone,

as you ached for completion, brow furrowed like the fresh soil tilled in a Kansas spring,

and you looked so incomplete, so desperate, needing me and reaching for me,

that I wrote the words back in patterns on your skin, like Hawaiian rain,

not brave enough to speak them,

to speak my truth aloud in that old motel room with the orange shag carpeting

somewhere outside of Detroit in the spring when the snow was brown mush

and it was still cold with a promise of rebirth and warmth and spring

and the ill-thought-out brown coverlet

when you first told me, and only me, that you loved me, and how -

as you gasped against me and your eyes flew wide as if you had never known paradise -

you said, paradise is the green in your eyes,

when I mentioned it, later, over doughnuts and cigarettes and coffee,

once we'd shaken off the torpor of post-sex drowse

and moved on down the road.

you tell me, _you asked what about this is real? We are._

and you tell me in California beneath the big pines,

and you murmur it in Nevada on the outskirts of Vegas,

and you take my hand and repeat it while we stand in front of the hot springs of Yellowstone,

and you laugh and tell me again when we surface in the waters off the Florida Keys at sunset,

and you have a look that says sex and threat and promise as you throw the beads over my head during Mardi Gras in New Orleans and you say it again,

and deep in the Minnesota forests you declare it at the side of a lake,

and you say it while laughing about the boredom of driving through the Oklahoma panhandle,

and you tell me again in the Black Hills of South Dakota just after Sturgis,

in the shadow of the unfinished statue of Crazy Horse,

at the water dispenser in Wall Drug,

on the top of the Empire State Building,

at the House on the Rock,

in Cleveland at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,

on a paddle steamer, one of the last on the Mississippi,

at a casino in Branson,

on a wrought-iron balcony in Savannah,

in the Gullah language on the Sea Islands,

in Louisiana Cajun French down in the bayous,

in the Scottish Gaelic of northern Minnesota,

in Anishinaabemowin and Hopi and Cree and Diné,

again and again,

everywhere, you keep telling me the same refrain

like the hymn from an old choral book.

When I finally turned to you, riding shotgun, your beloved face framed in noble profile, the American countryside passing by outside the window, and asked:

"Why do you keep saying that? I already know; you told me."

And your sweet lips caught on a smile, and you said:

"So that every last corner of America knows it, too."


	4. Author's Note

If you have never read Alan Ginsberg's [_Howl_](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl), I absolutely recommend it. This poem is the best depiction of the life of a drifter I have ever read, despite being extremely esoteric. It certainly gets the _feel_ of the thing across very well. Ginsberg was "Carlo Marx" in Jack Kerouac's _On The Road,_ probably the most famous story about drifters.

As a drifter who watches this show, I've long held that two things make a lot of sense:

1\. that Dean turned tricks _with guys_ to get money to feed Sam when they were kids, because let's be real here, it ain't women paying for sex at truck stops, and 2. that he's probably bisexual, see item 1.

_On The Road_ and _Howl_ are good examples of an earlier point I made - that drifters are mostly people who are not accepted by society in some way or another. You'll meet plenty of gay and bi and trans people on the road, along with every color, creed, nationality and personality imaginable. The whole manly-man-macho-dude-huntin'-and-fishin' thing is very much more your standard traditional never-moved-from-his-hometown type of guy. Drifters are an entire melting pot of different types of people - frequently _very_ different. Additionally, _Howl_ was partly written for Neal Cassady, who is called Dean Moriarty in _On The Road._ Cassady was famously bisexual, something of a whore, and frequently referred to as _the Adonis of the road._ Dean's companions are Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) and Carlo Marx (Alan Ginsberg, who wrote _Howl_ as a love poem based on his total devotion to Cassady).

So...you know. Sal, Dean, and Carlo. Make of all that what you will.


End file.
